I recently finished my latest drawing, and it hasn't struck a chord with the site's users as much as my previous work. Now, my work never really drew in the big numbers, but the difference is still significant and noticeable. I understand not all smut appeals to all people, still I'd like to learn what I can improve in my work.
The image in question is the following

Technique-wise, my first thought is that the eerie pinkish lighting makes the image a bit too garish, and unpleasant to look at. Maybe the shading and lighting was done too sloppily. Or there may be too big a quality/skill gap between the two characters and the floor. It could be my composition is too stilted and lifeless.

Regarding content, I might be repeating myself with my magic, demons 'n shit. It's probably not the kind of sexual content, since there's plenty similar stuff.

I like how you did the floor a lot! What stands out to me is the overall colour mood. For instance, the red skin of the demon doesn't really make since in a room where there is mostly pink light. To my eye the red colour should be shifted more towards blue and less towards orange. Hope that makes sense.

Ah yes, I think I see what you mean about the demon's colour, it does stand out.
I'm glad the floor came out as good as it did. It was a real pain in the ass, and must've taken at least twice the amount of time the rest took.

I think it shows a little. When you have the bg so much detailed, you need to have detail and attention in your focal point to be able to stand out from it. Possibly some of the floor could be blurred out with a FOV effect to help with the composition, dunno.

I was originally going to blur out the floor in the background a bit, but unfortunately, the version of SAI I'm working with doesn't really have a FOV effect. It does have a blur tool, but that averages the pixel values under the tool area, it'll take quite a while to carefully blur a whole area without smudging it all together.

In other news, I only just now found out SAI has filter options, so I can mess around a bit with the colour balance after I've finished an image. Unfortunately, it's not a very sofisticated filter (can't twidle with the rgb settings individually for example), but it'll definitely help.

I use sai and I have a brush I use for blur (not whatever came standard... I don't even remember ever using the standard brushes). Low blending, high persistence, and dilution and smoothing pressure both on 100%. If your figures and bg are on different layers it should be no big deal. If its all on the same layer you can make a layer mask with the select pen, but I usually just duplicate the layer, blur what I want, and then erase any overlap.

You can also get another program like GIMP (which happens to be free) and use the blur filters there. I also prefer GIMP for colour balancing, since it has more complex options (levels, curves, CMY/RBG sliders). Really sai is best used with in tandem with any program designed to handle photo editing. I know I've heard of people using a sai/photoshop combo too._________________✿ commission mailing list ✿

Oh sorry, I forgot to mention my blur tool is made with the watercol tool
I also use a variation of the marker tool for my sketching brush. You should check them out! The brushes you can make with the watercol tool is my favourite part of sai._________________✿ commission mailing list ✿

Oh and btw sai does create transparent bgs! The default white square is really transparent. You have to draw with white or fill with white to make a white colour. Test it out by drawing with white on the canvas, then making a new layer filled with any colour, then switching the layer order.

To save with transparency though you need to have a file type that supports it. jpg doesn't support transparency, for instance!

My version doesn't do that. I've got an older version that, when exporting a .png file automatically fills in the white. It might be because it's an old version I pirated 4 or 5 years ago.
But holy shit, you're right about the bottom layer actually being transparant.

hmhhh... i like the background in terms of color and shading,
but i would probably suggest softer shades on the characters where the lights and shadows melt together better, rather than one being more obviously painted on top of another-....
if that makes sense?_________________Hapsiel.

I'm no expert but I have a few ideas about what makes an image generally attractive to most people.

When it comes to what we might call "erotic art", I think one should feel free to push certain visual effects to more of an extreme than what would be found in more naturalistic images. So with this in mind, some key things I think it's important to incorporate are contrast, saturation, temperature shift, light effect and surface quality. I tried to incorporate these into a quick little paint-over of your image ( http://i.imgur.com/p8MlMp7.jpg ). The goal with this was to push these effects to make the picture stand out like what I call "visual candy".

A lot of this is based in composition and design rather than just if you can draw an accurate figure (although that helps too). I think one thing that at least helped me get better at this was just looking at great drawings and paintings for a long time. Just observing where forms overlap or where light meets dark in interesting ways sort of helps you think of interesting ways to design your images.

When it comes to colors and values, One practice I recommend is "glazing" your image. I often start from a more neutral colored image and use low opacity or overlay layers to glaze the image towards the colors I want. This way you can focus more on drawing and design in early stages and then values and colors after that is somewhat in place (I can send you screen caps from my work with this if you'd like an example).

When it comes to colors and values, One practice I recommend is "glazing" your image. I often start from a more neutral colored image and use low opacity or overlay layers to glaze the image towards the colors I want. This way you can focus more on drawing and design in early stages and then values and colors after that is somewhat in place (I can send you screen caps from my work with this if you'd like an example).

Hope that maybe some of that helped ^^

Really interesting! Can I have the screen caps too, please? Cause I'm not sure I understood well how you use it.